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President Obama ordered a review by his bioethics commission following the revelations that yet another experiment sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, was even more odious than the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. In the recently uncovered experiment, unwitting Guatemalans were deliberately infected with syphilis by the same doctor who conducted the Tuskegee experiment.
Additionally, the President charged the commission additionally with examining whether federal regulations and international standards "adequately
guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies supported
by the Federal Government."
The seemingly unending stream of morally repugnant medical experiments seem to confirm the need to protect society from immoral medical cowboys.
Dr. Maurice Henry Papworth, a British medical ethicist, and author of a 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, in which he exposed the unethical dimensions of medical research by identifying 78 examples of unethical experiments conducted on patients who were at National Health Service hospitals in the UK.
His standard for conducting human research could restore the integrity of medical research:
"No experiment should be
contemplated, proposed or undertaken which, if he were in circumstances identical to those of the intended subjects, the experimenter would even hesitate to submit himself, or members of his own family, or anybody for whom he had any respect or affection."
Posted by Vera Hassner Sharav
Nature
 President
Barack Obama today asked his bioethics commission to dig into the recent
discovery that US government-funded scientists intentionally infected subjects
with syphilis in a study in Guatemala in the 1940s.
"The research was clearly unethical," Obama wrote in a memorandum
to Amy Gutmann, the chair of the Presidential
Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. "In light of
this revelation, I want to be assured that current rules for research
participants protect people from harm or unethical treatment, domestically as
well as internationally."
While the Guatemala experiment is six decades old, the shift of many
pharamceutical companies' clinical trials overseas in recent years has brought
under scrutiny
the protection of human subjects in clinical trials outside of developed
nations.
Obama asked the commission, which is just concluding a report
on synthetic biology, to launch a panel in January charged with
examining if federal regulations and international standards "adequately
guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies supported
by the Federal Government."
He also asked the commission to "oversee a thorough fact-finding
investigation into the specifics of the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually
Transmitted Diseases Inoculation Study."
That study first came
to public attention last month when the US government apologized to
the government of Guatemala, and the survivors and descendants of those
infected in a National Institutes of Health-sponsored set of experiments
conducted between 1946 and 1948. In that study, nearly 700 Guatemalan
prisoners, soldiers and mental patients were intentionally infected with
syphilis without their knowledge or consent, in an effort to test penicillin's
effectiveness against the disease. Additional experiments involved other
sexually transmitted diseases.
The experiment was uncovered by Susan
Reverby, a medical historian at Wellesley College in Massachusetts,
who discovered records of it in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh.
(Read Nature's interview
with Reverby). Her findings are to be published in the Journal
of Policy History in January.
Obama instructed the commission to complete its work within nine months. He
added that it should hold "at least one meeting" outside the country,
enlist international experts, including experts from Guatemala, and report back
to him with its findings and recommendations.
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